MuniWireless

Jory Wolf, the CIO of the city of Santa Monica, California, says that the city has applied for $1 million in federal funding from the NTIA to provide ISPs in the Los Angeles area a connection to the city’s open fiber optic network. Unlike many cities which do not lease fiber capacity to service providers because they stupidly signed an agreement with the local cable company or the incumbent telco preventing them from doing so, Santa Monica wants to do…

Monrovia, California (pop. 38,000) is partnering with Champion Broadband to deploy a municipal wireless network running on the 2.4 and 4.9 GHz frequencies and they’re applying for a grant in the amount of $2.7 million from the NTIA under the BTOP program. Champion is putting up a percentage of the deployment costs if the grant comes through. Many cities and counties have put in applications for grant money from the federal government to improve broadband service in their areas. Read…

The city of Corona, California has deployed a municipal WiMAX network that uses point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and wireless mesh technologies to link the city hall to various municipal divisions. According to NetLogix (the firm that designed the network), “the WiMAX infrastructure provides real-time communications between multiple backbone sites and also provides mobile and portable vehicular data communications. The network utilizes wireless broadband equipment installed at key city-owned facilities, along with vehicular-installed and portable tripod units for wireless data transmission during various field…

The police department of Modesto, California has deployed a wireless video surveillance network that uses the 4.9 GHz frequency band. The first phase covers 5 x 5 city blocks in the downtown area with ten cameras. The cost is approximately $30,000 per camera (includes cost of servers, storage, wireless infrastructure, equipment in monitoring facility). The images are transmitted to the city hall (using 4.9 GHz), and from city hall, they are distributed over a fiber network to the police department.…

A study conducted by the UC Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society reveals that the surveillance cameras installed around San Francisco have failed to deter violent crime. They have been effective, however, in lowering property crimes within 100 feet of the cameras by 24 percent. But before you conclude that all surveillance video projects are useless based on the SF study, read the report. It points out several problems:

The city of Fresno, California recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the creation of a citywide wireless broadband network. In the RFP, the city states that it prefers not to spend any money on the network and that all of the costs of the deployment should be borne by the service provider (the private corporate franchise model). Given that this model has failed in a number of cities, prospective bidders submitted questions that revealed their serious reservations about…